Senior Windy City Hoopsters Don't Mind Getting A Little Winded

April 27, 1999|By Sean Callahan. Special to the Tribune.

For Jesse White, the drawback about becoming Illinois' secretary of state is that he can't play as much basketball as he wants. The 64-year-old White, for instance, has no time this spring to play in the Windy City Senior Basketball League. "I'm looking to get back at it when they gear up again (next year)," he says of the 50-and-over men's league, which is in its fifth season.

"Sweet" Charlie Brown, however, the league's founder and a DuSable High School hoops legend, isn't sure White will be welcomed back.

"There aren't enough balls in the gym for Jesse to play," jokes Brown, 62, who first faced White on the court nearly 50 years ago. "He's shooting it before he even gets it."

Honing their trash-talking skills is just one reason why the 100 members of the Windy City Senior Basketball League spend their Monday nights playing five-on-five, full-court basketball -- complete with referees, a scorer and shot clock -- long after their peers have hung up their high tops. Some of these graybeards say they play to stay fit. Others play because they still get a thrill out of beating the pants off somebody. And most keep at it simply because it never occurred to them to stop: They can't imagine life without the camaraderie the game has given them over the years.

"It's allowed me to rekindle some wonderful long-term relationships," says White, who acknowledges that Brown's critique of his game is accurate: "I shoot a lot."

In addition to White and Brown, plenty of other prominent Chicagoans gather regularly to run the floor at the Washington Park field house on the city's South Side. The Windy City Senior League's rosters include Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine, Sam's Liquors owner Fred Rosen and ex-NBA player Harvey Catchings. Ex-cops, teachers and retirees also play in the league.

"People don't care what your job is or what your financial status is," Devine says. "They're there because they love basketball. . . . What they really care about is if you're a good team player as opposed to the state's attorney or a business executive or a construction worker."

The camaraderie crosses racial lines, too, in a league where about half the players are white and half are African-American. Basketball is the glue, and no two players are bound closer by the game than Brown, who is black, and Mickey Rotman, who is white. In a now-legendary 1953 game played before a packed house at the International Amphitheater, DuSable's Brown hit a scoop shot in overtime over Rotman, playing for Roosevelt High School's all-white squad, to win the prestigious Illinois Institute of Technology tournament.

"That probably was the worst moment I've ever had on a basketball court," recalls the 62-year-old Rotman, now a LaSalle Street attorney.

After that season, the pair didn't cross paths for decades. Brown played for Seattle University with future NBA great Elgin Baylor, then became a top-notch high school basketball referee. When the pair finally met again in 1987, Rotman suggested restaging the ancient game as a fundraiser for DuSable and Roosevelt. Brown agreed and assembled a team.

The result was the same. Nearly 35 years later, the former DuSable players triumphed once again. What was different was that Brown and Rotman found they had become fast friends. "We talk to each other on the phone almost every day," Brown says.

About a dozen years ago, Brown and Rotman fell in with Pat Craddock, 64, Dick Hughes, 62, and Gerry Belko, 66. This crew had already formed a team to play in the new 50-and-over events at basketball tournaments around the country. (Masters swimming and track-and-field events have been popular for decades, but it was only when the senior athletics movement began to reach critical mass in the 1990s that it finally became feasible for men over 50 to compete against their peers in basketball and other team sports.)

But for Brown, the few trips a year and the intermittent tastes of competition weren't enough. So he hatched the idea for a local Chicago league, which began in 1995 with eight teams. Five seasons later -- with the aid of Rotman, Craddock, Hughes, Belko and others -- Brown's Windy City Senior Basketball League boasts a dozen teams. "I've got 20 more guys on the waiting list," Brown says.

The Windy City Senior Basketball League isn't all about brotherhood. Even though some of these men may have lost their hair, they're not about to lose a basketball game. "We want to win," Devine says, "but most of us have matured enough that we're not goofy about it. But we're not just going out there to bounce the ball."

"Most of these guys played a lot of ball, so they want to win," agrees Ken Reid, 54, who travels from his home in Algonquin to the South Side to play in the league. "It's hard to turn that off."

What has been turned off in most players, however, is the ability to jump and to stop on a dime, Reid says. With their reflexes diminished, the men develop new strategies to win games.